"And just how will you go about it?" he asked.
"I shall slip off to some quiet place, I think. I'll tell him before he
goes away. My attorneys will handle the matter for me--it's a sickening
business!" Rachael's beautiful face expressed distaste.
"It's done every day," Warren Gregory said.
"Of course divorce is not a new idea to me" Rachael presently pursued.
"But it is only in the last two or three days--for a week,
perhaps--that it has seemed to have that inevitable quality--that
the-sooner-over-the-better sort of urgency. I wonder why I didn't do it
years ago. I shall"--she laughed sadly--"I shall hate myself as a
divorced woman," she said. "It's a survival of some old instinct, I
suppose, but it doesn't seem RIGHT."
"It's done all the time," was the doctor's simple defence. "And oh, my
dear," he added, "you will know--and I will know--we can't keep
knowing--"
She stopped short, her lovely face serious in the shade of her parasol,
her dark-blue eyes burning with a sort of noble shame.
"Greg!" she said quickly and breathlessly. "Please---Let's not--let's
not say it. Let me feel, all this summer, that it wasn't said. Let me
feel that while I was living under one man's roof, and spending his
money, that I didn't even THINK of another man. It's done all the time,
you say, that's true. But I HATE it. Whether I leave Clarence, and make
my own life under new conditions, and never remarry, or whether, in a
year or two--but I won't think of that!" And to his surprise and
concern, as she stopped short on the grassy path, the eyes that Rachael
turned toward him were brimming with tears. "You s-see what a baby I am
becoming, Greg," she said unsteadily. "It's all your doing, I'm afraid!
I haven't cried for years--loneliness and injustice and unhappiness
don't make me cry! But just lately I've known what it was to dream
of--of joy, Greg. And if that joy is ever really coming to us, I want
to be worthy of it. I want to start RIGHT this time. I want to spend
the summer quietly somewhere, thinking and reading. I'm going to give
up cards and even cocktails. You smile, Greg, but I truly am! Just for
this time, I mean. And it's come to me, just lately, that I wouldn't
leave Clarence if he really needed me, or if it would make him unhappy.
I'm going to be different--everything SEEMS different already--"
"Don't you know why?" he said with his grave smile, as she paused. It
was enchanting to him to see the color flood her face, to see her shy
eyes suddenly averted. She did not answer, and they walked slowly
toward the clubhouse steps.
"There's only one thing more to say," Warren Gregory said, arresting
her for one more moment. "It's this: as soon as you're free, I'm coming
for you. You may not have made up your mind by that time, Rachael. My
mind will never change."
Shaken beyond all control by his tone, Rachael did not even raise her
eyes. Her flush died away, leaving her face pale. He saw her breast
rise on a quick breath.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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